The Life of Polycrates and Other Stories for Antiquated Children
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The Life of Polycrates and Other Stories for Antiquated Children
by Brendan Connell
Publication Date: 23rd March, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-907681-04-2
Paperback, 266 pages, 8.0 x 5.25 x 0.6 inches
Myth and imagination are confronted with historical precision in Brendan Connell’s newest collection of short fiction, bringing together a number of stories previously published in journals and anthologies as well as never before published material that includes the novella The Life of Polycrates, describing the rise to power of the ancient Greek ruler, his eccentric deeds and the fantastic personalities around him.
This is a book of bizarre histories and cerebral studies that explores the darkest passages of the human heart and brightest depravities of the human mind.
Contents
1 The Life of Polycrates
2 Collapsing Claude
3 The Dancing Billionaire
4 Brother of the Holy Ghost
5 Maledict Michela
6 The Life of Captain Gareth Caernarvon
7 Molten Rage
8 The Chymical Wedding of Des Esseintes
9 The Search for Savino
10 The Slug
11 Peter Payne
About The Author
Brendan Connell was born in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in 1970. He has had fiction published in numerous places, including McSweeney’s, Adbusters, Fast Ships, Black Sails (Nightshade Books 2008), and the World Fantasy Award winning anthologies Leviathan 3 (The Ministry of Whimsy 2002), and Strange Tales (Tartarus Press 2003). His published books are: The Translation of Father Torturo (Prime Books, 2005), Dr. Black and the Guerrillia (Grafitisk Press, 2005), and Unpleasant Tales (Eibonvale Press, 2010).
What People Say
With the yellow flag of Neo-Decadence lofted high, Connell exhumes the corpse of Mother Image and heaves it rank and rotting onto the tidy flowerbed of realist fiction. With their emphasis on sensation, texture, furnishings, and the nervous system, through the perceptions of characters ranging from ancient Greek tyrants to etiolated English aristocrats, libidinally-tormented popes, transvestite big-game hunters and Des Esseintes himself, The Life of Polycrates is a baedeker of the resurgent stylistic impulses linking the fin-de-siecle past to the Ornamentalist future.
Justin Isis
“[Connell] is a master of language, an endlessly inventive wordsmith who writes with a poet’s eye and vision . . .”
Peter Tennant, Black Static
“Every generation throws up a few genuine Masters of the Weird. There simply is no hyperbole in the statement that Brendan Connell is a member of this elite group right now, perhaps the most accomplished of them all.”
Rhys Hughes, author of A New Universal History of Infamy
“Brendan Connell must be counted as one of the most unique and talented purveyors of horror/fantasy/unclassifiable fiction currently at work.”
Fright.com
“Connell is nothing if not inventive, diverse and sublimely witty.”
The Agony Column
Online Reviews
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